Short links for March 11th, 2008

Some interesting things I bookmarked on del.icio.us on March 11th, 2008:

• Circuit bent mechanical furby sequencer – The Furby Gurdy! (YouTube video) – Each furby has 4 controls: mute, crash, loop and reset. The handle turns 8 cams which operate corresponding microswitches to create interesting rhythmic patterns.

Furby Gurdy! Find more cool circuit bent instruments on David Cranmer’s website.

• Bloxes – Bloxes are building blocks made of interlocking pieces of corrugated cardboard, folded together. Their unique shape and structure make them exceptionally strong and lightweight — you could build yourself a platform to stand on, and then pick it up and move it wherever you need to.
• This is your Brain on Jazz: Researchers use MRI to study spontaneity, creativity – A pair of Johns Hopkins and government scientists have discovered that when jazz musicians improvise, their brains turn off areas linked to self-censoring and inhibition, and turn on those that let self-expression flow.
• Chopper Tremolo Effect – Simple and low quality circuit (built it in about an hour), based on a simple NAND oscillator from an LED Chaser circuit.
• 35 Fantastic HDR Pictures – Applied carefully, High Dynamic Range-technique (HDR) can create incredibly beautiful pictures which blur our sense of the difference between reality and illusion.